Lead nurturing in the age of AI

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could close every lead in a single conversation?

In reality, it takes an average of eight touchpoints to convert a new prospect. Keep in mind that general consensus is the higher the ACV, the higher number of interactions to close a deal.  

That’s where lead nurturing can make a world of difference. 

By steadily engaging leads with messages that resonate when they’re most receptive to hearing them, you can build trust, guide them through the decision-making process, and increase the chances they’ll say yes when it’s time to make a deal.

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects over time. 

Rather than pushing for a quick sale, lead nurturing focuses on establishing and building trust. By providing valuable information and insights to leads at each stage of the buyer’s journey, reps can ensure their offerings stay top of mind until the lead is ready to make a purchase decision. 

In today’s dynamic B2B sales landscape, effective lead nurturing occurs over multiple channels, including email, social, your content marketing efforts, and even advertising. It’s a sales approach where each step has a clear and concise objective, like educating the prospect on your products or trying to engage them at the most opportune time. By speaking directly to the lead’s pain points and unique circumstances on a consistent basis, reps can position themselves as trusted advisors — not pushy salespeople — and cultivate stronger relationships because of it. 

That trust pays dividends. Research suggests that the best lead nurturing teams generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Since nurtured leads spend 47% more than their non-nurtured counterparts, lead nurturing can make a massive impact on the bottom line.

To understand what lead nurturing is, it’s just as important to understand what it isn’t. 

Lead nurturing isn’t just blasting generic emails to your entire prospect list and calling it a da. It’s also not just firing out an email after your initial meeting thinking this will win them over. Instead of just pushing your product over and over again, the best lead nurturing strategies add value every step of the way, treating each prospect as the unique B2B buyers they are.

Even the best lead nurturing strategies don’t convert every single prospect into a paying customer. But even when prospects don’t become customers, they can still become brand ambassadors signing your praises and recommending you to others in their network. As you set up your lead nurturing campaigns, don’t forget about this often overlooked group of folks!

Core components of an effective lead nurturing strategy

Lead nurturing is all about moving leads through the sales funnel and ultimately persuading them to make a purchase. Rather than pushing for instant conversions, reps use lead nurturing to cultivate relationships by qualifying leads and targeting prospects that are most likely to convert. Through personalized outreach, consistent cadences, and analytics, reps can engage prospects and continuously fine-tune their lead nurturing strategies, getting better and better results over time.

Successful lead nurturing requires understanding your customers, their problems, their goals, and their decision-making processes. The best lead nurturing campaigns consider the unique characteristics of each ideal customer profile (ICP) your organization is targeting, ensuring that each touchpoint resonates and provides value. 

For example, teams in different industries may use your product differently. A finance team might care most about compliance features while a healthcare provider might be most interested in data security. Creating specific lead nurturing campaigns for each of these ICPs is ideal because it ensures that your messages and content are relevant to all prospects.

As you get started with lead nurturing, think about these key components.

Segmentation and targeting

If you want to nurture leads at scale, you need to segment leads into groups based on shared characteristics — like industry, company size, and job role — so that you can deliver more relevant messaging to each prospect. 

As you learn more about leads over time, leverage behavioral signals like website visits and content downloads to highly personalize messaging and ensure every interaction feels relevant and organic.

LeadIQ enhances lead nurturing by helping reps capture and automatically enrich contact data with firmographic, technographic, and intent signals. As a result, it’s easier to identify how to split your audience up into segments. Once that’s done, LeadIQ helps you streamline outreach at scale with generative AI email writing tools, enabling you to cover more ground in less time. 

Pro tip: Segments aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing. Regularly revisit them to confirm they still align with your ICPs. While you’re at it, track the effectiveness of your messaging by monitoring engagement metrics (e.g., click-through rates and email opens) to see which tactics are working the best and which need to be tweaked. By using data to continuously refine your segments and your messaging, you can ensure your campaigns stay relevant and effective, ultimately helping you to win more business. 

Scalable personalization with proper lead nurturing tools

If you want to personalize outreach at scale, you need to have tools that enable you to automatically deliver timely messages to each prospect. As you begin devising your lead nurturing strategy, make sure your reps have access to these technologies:

• A customer relationship management (CRM) system like Salesforce and HubSpot that stores lead information, tracks interactions, and makes it easy to identify where each lead is in the buyer’s journey;
• A B2B contact data provider like LeadIQ, which provides exceptionally accurate B2B contact data, including email, phone numbers, along with firmographic, technographic, and demographic info (better yet, use tools like LeadIQ and Clay together to make your data even richer!);
• Marketing automation tools like Marketo and Pardot that automate personalized campaigns and nurturing workflows, ensuring leads receive relevant messages at the most opportune times; and
• Sales engagement platforms, including Salesloft, Outreach, and Gong, that track and record interactions, sequence follow-ups, and measure engagement, helping reps capture the data they need to enhance their campaigns.

Multi-channel engagement via sales and marketing alignment

To succeed with lead nurturing, you need to reach the right people in the right place at the right time. If a prospect spends all day on LinkedIn but you’re only hitting them up via email, your perfect message might get missed. 

By coordinating outreach across channels — including email, social media, and phone calls — you can ensure leads see relevant messages at the best times.

Before launching your next campaign, make sure sales and marketing are aligned. When both teams send different messaging, it can confuse prospects, reducing the chances they ultimately become customers. Since it takes an average of eight touches to convert, you need to ensure consistent messaging across channels, which builds trust and supports a holistic customer journey.

Content mapping to buyer stages

Since each prospect takes a unique path to becoming a customer, it’s important to incorporate content mapping into your lead nurturing strategy, aligning content to specific stages in the buyer’s journey:

• During the awareness stage, produce blog posts, infographics, and other collateral that defines the problem leads face and how you can solve it.
• During the consideration stage, share case studies, webinars, and product comparison guides to help leads evaluate their options while establishing your credibility.
• During the decision stage, offer free trials and one-on-one demos to give leads that one final push toward a conversion.

By mapping content to buying stages, you can avoid sending prospects irrelevant content, which can improve engagement and accelerate sales cycles.

Lead nurturing tactics and strategies

In the age of artificial intelligence, lead nurturing has no doubt evolved. Reps have access to all sorts of tools they can use to personalize outreach at scale, use predictive scoring to qualify leads, and automate repetitive workflows.

Even so, the core principles of lead nurturing haven’t changed. While sales teams should absolutely leverage AI enhancements to improve lead nurturing, they still need to lean heavily on the battle-tested fundamentals.

Email

Despite the rise of new channels, email is still the foundation of nurturing leads at scale. Its flexibility makes personalization and segmentation easy, which is why it remains one of the most effective ways to connect with prospects. 

According to HubSpot’s 2025 State of Prospecting Report, 73% of B2B buyers want sellers to reach out to them over email. At the same time, 75% of B2B businesses agree that email provides “good to excellent” ROI. 

Not only is email what potential buyers prefer, it’s proven to be a lucrative channel for sellers, too.

As you begin building lead nurturing strategies, consider the myriad ways you can use email to build rapport with leads:

• Newsletters that highlight thought leadership and industry updates, helping keep your brand top of mind (71% of B2B brands nurture leads via email newsletters);
• Personalized follow-ups, like after an event or demo, thanking the prospect for their time and interest;
• Drip campaigns, or automated series of emails that guide prospects through the buyer journey; and
• Triggered emails sent after a prospect completes a specific action, like downloading an ebook or visiting the pricing page.

Social media

Since 75% of B2B buyers use social media to research products, sellers need to be active on social channels to meet their prospects where they already are. 

In an era where authenticity matters most, buyers increasingly trust people more than faceless company pages. Since most prospects follow employees instead of brands, your reps’ personal presence on sites like LinkedIn is crucial for sales success.

Encourage your reps to build up their own personal brands and cast a wider net by sharing content and commenting on prospects’ posts. It’s an easy way to highlight the humans behind your company while expanding your reach and staying top of mind, ultimately increasing lead nurturing success.

Content marketing

Great content marketing — webinars, videos, blogs, infographics, ebooks, podcasts, you name it — fuels effective lead nurturing. 

By publishing a steady stream of content, you can educate leads, providing value free of charge that helps your brand build credibility and authority. This content can be published on your website, shared on social media, and sent directly to prospects’ inboxes, enabling them to find information in whatever way is most convenient.

Many sales teams are so laser-focused on leads that are hot and ready to convert that they overlook prospects who are earlier in the buyer’s journey. Increase the chances those leads also become paying customers by producing bottom-of-the-funnel content, like case studies, white papers, and product comparison guides. That way, you can help prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey make informed decisions.

Retargeting & remarketing ads

Just because a prospect lands on your site or signs up for your email list doesn’t mean your job is done. In today’s disjointed and distracted world, keeping your brand top of mind is harder than ever. This is where retargeting and remarketing ads can come in handy, especially paired with a relevant content offer like a case study of a customer in the same industry or a free record of an on-demand webinar. 

By incorporating retargeting into your lead nurturing strategy, you can remind prospects of your brand’s value while reinforcing your messaging. With the right approach, it’s an effective way to move them down the funnel.

Sales emails

While we’ve talked about email marketing, nothing can push a prospect to the next stage like a high-quality personalized sales email. 

And if you’re not using video in your outreach, you’re doing it wrong. The data speaks for itself:

• 60% of sales reps see higher response rates using video for sales outreach
• 59% of recipients remember details from videos vs. 46% from text
• 65% of viewers watch business-related videos all the way through if they’re less than 60 seconds

Whatever you do, don’t forget about direct sales emails and using video as a persuasive lead nurturing tactic! 

Common lead nurturing mistakes

Lead nurturing isn’t just about setting up outbound sequences, firing off emails, and calling it a day. Even good leads can grow cold if they’re mishandled. 

By understanding the common lead nurturing mistakes and how they can derail momentum, you can avoid other teams’ missteps and devise a strategy that accelerates each prospect’s path to conversion.

Failing to align sales and marketing

When sales and marketing teams speak different languages, prospects get confused. Maybe messaging is inconsistent or repetitive, maybe handoffs to sales are too early or too late, or maybe reps simply lack the context they need to create messaging that truly resonates.

By aligning sales and marketing, go-to-market (GTM) teams can ensure everyone’s working from the same page. With shared CRMs, an integrated sales tech stack, and agreed-upon definitions of key terms (e.g., MQL vs. SQL), sales and marketing can work together to deliver a truly seamless buyer’s journey, making it easier to close deals.

Overautomation without personalization

Here at LeadIQ, we’re big believers in automation, and we work hard to help reps automate repetitive tasks so they can focus more on selling. But leaning too heavily on automation early on can have disastrous consequences. 

We all know what it feels like to receive sales emails that seem to be written by robots or are completely irrelevant to our current situation. You download a content asset, your inbox lights up, and you receive an entirely unrelated message referencing a report written four years ago.

Huh?

Automate too much, without oversight, and a lead might receive the wrong content or the same message multiple times. Whatever the case may be, this fractures their experience and makes them second guess whether you’re the right vendor. 

The simple fix is ensuring that every message you send to prospects is highly personalized using rich contact data, behavior signals, and other relevant information. (LeadIQ can help with this!)

While automation can certainly help your team sell more, make sure you review workflows regularly and adjust them as trends shift and behavior evolves. 

In other words, use AI and automation intelligently — not something that will solve all your problems if you simply pay an invoice.

Ignoring post-trial and post-purchase nurturing

If you only focus on leads pre-sale, you can miss out on opportunities to further nurture them after a trial or purchase. 

When reps don’t follow up with leads after a trial, they go cold because they need guidance and find themselves asking a simple question: What now? Similarly, if a lead buys your software and is greeted by silence, they may begin to have their doubts.

Avoid this misstep by creating onboarding sequences and upsell/cross-sell flows that are triggered automatically by each lead’s actions. Not only does this ensure leads know what to do post-trial and new customers have strong first impressions, it also establishes the groundwork you need to cultivate loyal customers. 

By proving you’re interested in more than a one-time sale, you can boost retention and word-of-mouth referrals. Cha-ching! 💰

Not leveraging customer data effectively

You might have all the data in the world. But if you’re not putting it to use, what’s the point? 

Far too often, contact data sits in CRMs and isn’t used in campaigns. That’s how you end up firing off beginner content to an experienced power user or sending generic drivel to someone you’ve talked to nine times.

By investing in the right tools, segmenting potential customers based on behavior, demographics, and firmographic data, and personalizing emails based on buyer’s stage, interests, and specific actions, you can nurture leads with messaging that actually matters, improving conversion rates.

How LeadIQ helps thousands of teams nurture their leads

Looking to launch or uplevel your lead nurturing program?

LeadIQ can help.

Thousands of teams, including Clari, Greenhouse, and Optimizely, use our real-time contact data and AI-powered prospecting tools to supercharge lead nurturing efforts, optimize sales processes, and ultimately close more deals. 

‍Take LeadIQ for a test drive today to see how you can use our platform to learn more about your prospects, nurture leads at every stage more effectively, and reach the right person with the right message at the right time.